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April 13, 2012

A famously private and often difficult man, Jack Tramiel resists easy eulogization in death with the same stubbornness that made him such an enigma throughout his life. We know that he was born Jewish in Poland at just about the worst possible historical moment, and that he alone of his family survived the horrors of Auschwitz. Yet we know little more about his early life; he has a few different birthdates on record, and even his own sons are not certain of his birth name. We know that he came to America, and in a classic American tale transformed himself from a penniless refugee into a computer executive and millionaire. Yet even in those later years there was an air of mystery about this brash bulldog of a man. You never quite knew what he was thinking, never knew whether to label him a scoundrel or a visionary. Perhaps he was both.

Tramiel's two most famous quotations are "Business is war" and "Computers for the masses, not the classes." Together they illuminate some of the contradictions of the man. Under the former mantra, Tramiel seemed to positively delight in betraying and destroying not just competitors but also suppliers, dealers, and even his own employees when they crossed or betrayed him in reality or in his imagination. Under the latter, he placed computers in the hands of an entire generation who couldn't afford the pricier, more respectable, and much less fun machines from Apple and IBM. Even if your childhood memories don't include a friendly blue screen and a blinking BASIC READY prompt (too bad for you!), Tramiel changed your life. Linus Torvalds is only the most famous of the thousands who discovered the wonders of computers through the VIC-20 or Commodore 64, then grew up to build the digital future we live in today. In the process of living through one of the most crazy life stories I know, Jack Tramiel changed the world.

December 07, 2011

Today marks the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The events of December 7, 1941 not only triggered US involvement in World War II, but also created opportunity for women to join a workforce that was previously dominated by men. In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, Kurt Beyer tells about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992), who joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, made herself "one of the boys" in Howard Aiken's wartime Computation Laboratory, and created the tools that would allow humans to communicate with computers in terms other than ones and zeroes. Grace's advance influenced all future programming and software design and laid the foundation for the development of user-friendly personal computers. Here's an excerpt from the book to commemorate both Pearl Harbor and Grace Hopper:

Anecdotes abound of the late Admiral Hopper, the majority highlighting her most lauded trait: irreverence bordering on insubordination. Nonetheless, the first 36 years of her life were marked by a certain amount of conventionality. In the 1920s it was not uncommon for privileged women from the Northeast to seek higher education. In fact, the percentage of women receiving doctorates in mathematics during the 1920s and the early 1930s was not achieved again until the 1980s. This reminds us that the history of women's emancipation in America has not been linear. Rather than steady progress, there have been waves of opportunity and retrenchment--for example, increasing opportunity in the 10 years after World War I, then retrenchment during the Depression. Hopper came of age during the 1920s, and both her public choices and her private ones coincided rather than conflicted with the desires of her family and her community.

The attack on Pearl Harbor and the ensuing mobilization created unprecedented career opportunities for women. The large-scale reorganization of labor opened a wide variety of occupations that before 7 December 1941 were reserved for men. The most iconic cultural image of this period, Rosie the Riveter, represented the millions of women who replaced men in the workforce as they deployed to Europe and the Pacific. Like millions of other women of her generation, Hopper benefited from this labor shift. And Pearl Harbor was a watershed in Grace Hopper's personal life as well as in her career. In the months following that fateful day, she divorced her husband, left a secure tenure-track position at Vassar College, and joined the Navy. She then became an officer in one of the most gendered organizations of its day. Her military rank endowed her with the external trappings of authority: uniform, title, privilege. Military rank, protocol, and tradition helped to neutralize societal prejudices agains women in positions of public responsibility.

The benefits of military rank were evident as newly minted Lieutenant (j.g.) Hopper was assigned to Commander Howard Aiken's Harvard Computation Laboratory during the war. Aiken, a difficult man who would be classified as a "male chauvinist" by today's standards, found a kinship with Hopper not because she was a rebel but because of her ability to ingratiate herself to Aiken and her fellow workers. Of course she was a talented mathematician and computer programmer, but more importantly she was loyal to her boss and helped to organize and control his laboratory. She actively erased gender differences through her clothing, her language, her drinking habits, and her humor, gaining the trust and respect of Aiken and her peers to the point that she became the most prominent person in the Harvard Computation Laboratory apart from the fiery Aiken.

October 11, 2011

Richard DeMillo, author of Abelard to Apple, reflects on Steve Jobs' impact on the computing world.

There are already hundreds of thousands of sincere words of praise for Steve Jobs, his career, his style, and the profound—and sometimes emotional—impact that his products had on the world. I am more pessimistic.

His greatest gift, wrapped in ribbons and left on corporate doorsteps, will probably remain unopened by a new generation of general managers who seem destined to apply, as if by rote formula, rules for managing haberdasheries and computer companies alike. Jobs was not that kind of executive.

It’s a good thing too, because when he took over the reins of Apple Computer it had been in the hands of general managers for quite awhile. Apple was the most inefficient company in the industry. It carried, for example, an appalling 70 days of inventory. By 2000, when Apple’s creative bursts began in earnest, Apple carried less than one day of inventory and was among the most efficient manufacturing companies in the world.

Steve Jobs violated axioms and experimented with the consequences on a scale unheard of in modern business. An urban myth has arisen that he always knew what he was doing. In truth, he failed as often as he succeeded. Apple fired him for being a loose cannon. Both of his subsequent ventures were forced to close their hardware businesses. But like all experiments in the hands of genius, the failures had infinite value.

I was at HP when Jobs’ most remarkable experiments took place – when axioms were violated. Most of us believed that you had to design computers from the inside out. Apple not only rejected that but also guessed that the public would understand a music player like an iPod™ better than a handheld computer like a Jornada™. HP eventually gave up and even tried selling iPods for a while. Until iTunes came along, it was just assumed that computer companies couldn’t sell content like music and movies. When the first Apple stores opened in 2001, I wrote an internal memo explaining with charts and graphs what a bad idea it was for a computer company to run a retail store. What none of us knew was that Jobs was already experimenting with what it meant to be a computer company.

Steve Jobs famously said in a 1998 interview that “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” The same is true for history’s great experimenters. It would be ironic if the rest of the industry ended up stealing from him, but I am not optimistic that will happen.

December 07, 2009

Congress has recently passed a resolution to make the week of December 7th National Computer Science Education week in honor of Grace Hopper’s
birthday. To celebrate this event, we asked several scholars
about their thoughts on the current state of the field, as well the
current state of education in computer science. First up is Thomas H. Cormen. He teaches at Dartmouth and is a
co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, the third edition is just out.

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in computer science education?

Two things make me feel like an old fogey: seeing surfers off
Lighthouse Point in Santa Cruz, and thinking about computer science
education. Although it's great that students have their own computers
now, there was an educational advantage in the old machine room/batch
processing model that I grew up with. Because we got very few runs in
during the course of an evening, every run of every program was
precious. When my program didn't work, I pored over the listing, really
trying to understand what was going on. Today's students tend to
randomly morph the program until it works, and when they finally get it
working, I'm not sure they understand why. (I will confess that's
exactly how I write LaTeX macros.) So there are times that I think, not
so facetiously, that we should revert to a model where students get to
run a program at most once every 20 minutes. My real answer is not that
I think we need big changes in computer science education; it's that I
think we need students to have a better understanding of what computer
science is. Too many think that it's about making websites, or that
being a dedicated gamer gives a leg up in learning how to write good
programs. We might have been better off in the old days, when students
had no idea what computer science was before taking a course in it,
than now, when students harbor misinformed ideas about computer science.

And watch for interviews with Jane Margolis and Joanna Goode, Mitchell Wand, Ken Ford, and Bob Harper throughout the week.

This year’s ICRA was held in Kobe, Japan where my most challenging task of the week was ordering food in a restaurant with no English speakers or English writing anywhere. I dined with four roboticists (and if the question is how many roboticists does it take to order dinner in Japan, the answer is way more than we had there). After much pointing and gesturing (and with some help from a few very friendly locals) we ended up with a basket full of dead fish on the table. From there we had to choose the ones we wanted, easy enough, and explain how we wanted them cooked – really not so easy.

Next to the food, robots were definitely the highlight. This conference has quite a few robotic displays, from those that will one day roam the surface of other planets to those that will one day roam the surface of our living rooms. My favorite by far is Keepon, a little bot that looks like two yellow nerf balls sitting on top of one another. There’s a Wii-type application where you hold a remote control kind of thing and when you bop up and down, he bops up and down with you. When you sway side to side, he sways with you. It’s quite endearing and is meant to ultimately be used to enhance social skills and interaction among kids with various disabilities.

April 01, 2009

April 1, 1976, The Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) began a small computer company in California. So much of what gets done in publishing (and what doesn't get done in publishing)is possible because of Mac computers.

September 19, 2008

Today's the pub date for a book that's important not only for its scholarship but for how that scholarship is being delivered to the reader. Opening Up Education is a collection of papers by scholars that explore how open access - the free, online availability of materials - can transform education. The book - a copublication with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching - describe the challenges and benefits of a whole range of initiatives that marshal open access tools, resources, and knowledge.

Fittingly, in addition to making the book available in standard hard copy form - for a very reasonable price, might we add - we're also making the book itself and open access resource. You can go here and either download a PDF version or read a very attractive iPaper edition.

August 05, 2008

The Olympics, which kick off in three days, are attracting more attention than usual this year. One reason is the Internet censorship to which foreign journalists are being subjected during the Beijing games. Less than a week ago, it was reported that China would prevent access to web pages dealing with issues that the government deems overly sensitive, such as those involving Tibetan and Taiwanese independence. This seven years after China, in its bid to land the 2008 Olympics, declared that there would be "no restrictions on journalists in reporting the Olympic Games."

July 01, 2008

Stanford University's School of Education recently mandated an open access policy to faculty scholarship. Members of the school's faculty unanimously voted to all require all their published articles to be made available in a free online database.

June 06, 2008

Rich Gold's The Plenitude is a whimsical yet serious meditation on the ecology of stuff within which we live and create. It's also a relatively short book - less than 150 pages. For anyone who's craved more wisdom from this lighthearted polymath, you can now check out "The Plenitude: A Companion." It consists of autobiographical reflections from Gold, in the same literary and visual style as the book.